


that which you call home

by metropolisjournal (TKodami)



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: (sorta) fight sex, 90s comics cheese, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Clark comes back to life like he do, Electric Blue Superman, M/M, Nudity, Post-Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Shaving Kink, Time Travel, cameo appearance by The Carrier (the Authority)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 08:49:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8279977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/pseuds/metropolisjournal
Summary: Clark came back to life a little weird, and maybe Bruce was overthinking things. Otherwise, everything seemed to be fine. Except, maybe, for the random nudity.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



> So! This fic. *gestures at it* The author would like to thank my writing cheerleaders from FFA, [architeuthis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis) and [Liodain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme). Seriously, without you guys, I would not have been able to tackle this project.
> 
> To my recip, I sincerely apologize for the rough nature of the prose. I picked up your prompt as a last-minute pinch hit, and it squeaked into the collection just under deadline. I hope that I managed to include some things that will hit you right.
> 
> This fic was not beta’d, so all remaining errors are mine.
> 
> (Comment at the end about comics references, for readers who are interested!)

* * *

There were few things in life that Bruce found difficult to perform. In his experience, the mastery of a skill simply required the application of will. His training had borne out this observation. When his feet had slipped on roofing tile fleeing from Mujahideen guards (he’d stolen bread for a gaunt, sunken-eyed child), he had learned to balance on the tops of bamboo poles no larger than a silver dollar. When he had thrown himself into his first fight to stop a mugger--and suddenly discovered he was surrounded by a band of cut-purses--he had learned to anticipate the movements of multiple bodies in the crowded press of the bazaar. When he’d almost succumbed to delirium in a punishing march at gunpoint out of the city, he’d learned to withstand the heat and the biting cold in the desert caves of Jalalabad. Human skills were more demanding, to be sure--but hardly more difficult than mastering biofeedback, control of heart rate, respiration, blood flow, fear. 

Bruce demonstrated exactly how well he’d mastered these skills with a backhanded fist into the face of a gun-smuggler, and a low sweep to a charging sentry, who brandished a fixed blade tactical knife. Gunfire from a fortified position sent him diving into the bed of a covered truck. 

(The Batsuit could stand up to most handheld calibres--but the runners had wasted no time. Even with the Port of Gotham in ruins, even with the military setting up new containment sites and traffic checkpoints in Metropolis, nothing had stopped the smugglers’ trucks from rolling across Metrobridge Crossing. Even now, a deal was being struck between the Russians and some up-and-comers that he hadn’t identified before he had spotted his chance to neutralize the cargo.) 

Bruce knocked against an ammo crate. He jimmied open the lid. Rage stole through him, directionless and savage.

Gotham criminals were smuggling anti-personnel rounds through Metropolis. Black-tipped armor piercing rounds that could put Batman in the grave faster than-- 

_Still._ Even armor piercing bullets were hardly a setback. 

Bruce cut a hole through the truck's canopy, slipping away between magazine reloads. It was quick work to scale the warehouse scaffolding, run across the beams, and drop behind the gunner before he’d realized that the Batman hadn’t been pinned down or killed. With a rough chokehold, Bruce neutralized the threat. As the man slumped into his arms, Bruce breathed out shortly, panic threading through heart. Scrambling at the catches, Bruce ripped off one of his gauntlets, and jammed two fingers against the man’s pulse point. _Alive._ Thank God, alive. 

The infiltration had been quick--but not quick enough. A shout went up from the lookouts; Batman’s partycrash had been discovered. The doors to the warehouse crashed open, and more men poured in. Russians, and the new guys. Bruce tucked the gauntlet into his belt, and then--

He flew into battle. 

It was an old dance that Bruce danced with the criminals of Gotham--twenty years of it--

Grief was another matter.

It had been three days since they buried Clark. Three days since Bruce had found himself surrounded by the winter wheat, the horse-drawn cart, the salt of the earth folk of Clark’s hometown. Bruce had had plenty of practice with grief--glass and stone monuments worth of it--enough to know that there was no mastery to be found over it. The pageantry of death was just as unbearable to him now as it had been as a child. 

Only now, Bruce didn’t need to bury himself in the earth. He _was_ the darkness. 

Bruce bared his teeth in a primal snarl, and he kicked, punched, ducked, dodged and slashed his grief into them. The criminals of Gotham would understand the depth of their mistake tonight; they would live to regret bringing Metropolis into the gutter with them.

* * *

Bruce had miscalculated. He gritted his teeth as he smashed a man against the warehouse wall, and buried his knife into his shoulder to pin him in place. The blood seeped down Bruce's sides in three different places. After Bruce had taken apart Lex’s hired muscle on the night of the Incident (Gotham hadn’t found a better name for the Kryptonian creature’s rampage yet; they weren’t going to call it something as hyperbolic as _Doomsday_ , as their sister-city had), the Russians had absorbed the lesson of their defeat. They came prepared. Less automatic weaponry, more hand-to-hand piercing weapons. While Batman could hold off five men, he couldn’t do it without turning his back to someone’s knife. The last one had gone between his seventh and eighth ribs. Nothing punctured, but his reaction had slowed just enough for someone to jam a gun into his jaw. 

Maybe this was it. 

Bruce wasn’t a religious man, and Alfred--Alfred already knew the most important thing Bruce could tell him.

Anymore than that, Bruce didn’t have time to think. His body was already in motion, countering with an overhand chop meant to direct the bullet towards his center mass instead of his face--but he hadn’t been aware that another outcome was possible. 

There in the center of the warehouse, a sudden inrush of energy and power knocked everyone off of their balance (everyone except Bruce, who hunkered down to compensate for the shift) and a hole opened in the world. This wasn’t the riot of energy that the Flash had appeared in--that Bruce had, in all likelihood, dreamed--it was an almost calm interplay of light and color over a barrier of energy. 

As his opponent whipped his head around in shock, Bruce completed the disarm and sent him sprawling with a vicious kick to the midsection. 

The Russians regained their footing. A few men limped to their feet, ready for round two. In his desire to not wound any of them lethally, Bruce had been holding back. His second miscalculation. 

They closed in a semi-circle. As Bruce raised his arms into a guard position, back tucked as close to the wall as he dared, the gate flashed, and closed. Well--whatever had caused that energy disturbance--it had nice timing at least.

A warm darkness descended on Bruce, settling in his stomach like a old friend. The calm certainty of violence overtook him, and--

That’s when the world pitched suddenly from something Bruce understood to something he didn’t. 

The warmth increased to a fever flush as a glowing _something_ descended behind him. The Russians paled in absolute terror. The cry of _Angel! Angel!_ spread through the warehouse like a wildfire. Bruce--refused to turn. And just as well; the Russians gawked at the overwhelming radiance but regrouped quickly, and lunged at Bruce with their knives. 

As he rolled with the first slash, he felt a buzz of electricity pass by his ear as the glowing person shot past him--and _through_ one of the attackers. The light stopped, and emitted what could only be termed _puzzlement_ , before the fight was truly joined. The angel, or whatever it was, apparently couldn’t touch anything, but its radiance was impossibly bright. After one attacker screamed in agony, shielding his eyes from its presence, it seemed to understand how light could be used to their advantage. It fell to Bruce’s back, and stunned any attackers that tried for Bruce’s blind spots. 

(Bruce couldn't think of it as an angel; having met the embodiment of a Greek goddess, and a super-powered alien, Bruce had become wide-open to the ideas of the extra-normal. But some ideas were still too wild, for him.)

When the last man had slumped against the ground--Bruce activated the HUD in his cowl to shield his eyes, and whirled to face it.

 _It_ \--or rather _he_ \--had stopped glowing, and was scratching the back of his neck rather apologetically. And that was then Bruce noticed that he wasn’t wearing anything but his skin. Strangely blue and translucent for a human, but--

\--maybe not so strange for a Kryptonian.

With all of the calm that Bruce could muster, over the accelerating beat of his heart: “You are supposed to be _dead_.”

Clark barely had the decency to be abashed before he launched himself at Bruce in what might have been an enthusiastic hug, but felt like static leaping through his chest. Clark’s hand passed right through Bruce’s arm, chest, and brushed against his heart.

Bruce flinched backward. (Minutely--the recall too fresh of a Superman that had punched through his chest; minutely--because he didn’t want Superman to know how much more the metaphor had hurt) And Clark snatched his hand back, looking at it as though it was a particularly disobedient piece of machinery. 

“Huh.” Clark flexed his fingers. Then looked down at his legs. His feet hovered a few centimeters off the ground. He tried touching down--and watched as his feet sank _through_ the concrete floor. Clark quirked his head at Bruce, and grinned. “Well, that explains a few things.” 

Bruce triggered the HUD to retract on the cowl without any input from the tactical part of his brain (that were screaming that this was a bad idea), and he saw Clark with his own eyes. This wasn’t Superman. Not because he wasn’t wearing the suit. But because none of the details were right about him. A dim (but still visible) radiance surrounded him, a halo around a very well-muscled, living light bulb. Was this-- _Clark_? Could death have so completely changed him? 

At his heart, Bruce was a pessimist; the reason he planned for the worst possible outcomes was because in his experience, worst-possible was another way of saying most-probable--but never had he imagined _this_. The easy play of affection around Clark’s eyes, the relief pouring off of him, given to someone who had done nothing ( _yet_ ) to deserve it-- _but could have, if only he had been given more time_.

“Br--” Clark started, but was cut off by the slash of Bruce’s ungauntleted hand.

“Not here,” Bruce grunted. Without any other preamble, he added: “The Cave,” and turned away. Because--because there wasn’t much else Bruce could do to keep his grief and his joy running together like rivers. 

* * *

Outside of the warehouse, Bruce attempted to signal Alfred to return the Batwing to the Cave on autopilot. Static drowned all communications channels. Bruce pursed his lips, as he watched a translucent Kryptonian zip across the sky as fast as lightning. _Well._ Bruce had a job to do at least. He commandeered the smugglers’ truck, and drove it to the nearest military checkpoint. The soldiers dropped their aim when he stepped out of the cab, loaded his grapnel gun, and swung himself onto the nearest ledge.

From his perch, he watched the guards decide how best to write up this report in their duty log. The bruised knuckles of Batman’s ungloved hand was the biggest topic of conversation; from the tales the locals had spun, the soldiers had imagined the Bat to be hewed from the living darkness. Flesh and bone and body armor was the last thing they expected. 

The communicator worked fine now. (The interference’s appearance and disappearance correlated to Clark, Bruce decided.) Which meant that Bruce was focused on nothing more than returning to the Cave. “Alfred,” Bruce said, in that same steady tone he had used minutes earlier. “Top of Sentinel Plaza.”

“Is everything alright, sir?”

Bruce replied in the affirmative (Alfred invariably knew that meant the opposite, but Bruce was grateful that he was allowed these little fictions), then added after a beat: “Autopilot, slowest speed.” 

He left the rooftop in silence, and returned to the Cave in silence. He half-expected to find Alfred already in the company of a radiant Clark--but no, Clark had no way of knowing where the Cave was unless he followed the Batwing...did he? They had been enemies, they had been allies, and then he had been dead. Barely dead. When would he have found the time to surveil Bruce’s life as Bruce had longed to have done for Clark’s?

“Are you waiting for something in particular, Master Wayne?” Alfred asked pointedly, after he’d finishing patching the worst of Bruce’s injuries. 

“There was another,” Bruce said, feeling around for the spot he’d felt the knife slide in, “between 7 and 8 on the left side--”

Alfred toweled off his hands, and threw the blood-soaked sterile wipe into the tray with the forceps and bandages. “If you’d needed stitches, I would have called in Leslie, rather than mucked about with it myself. If I may say so: you’re surprisingly spry for having survived a twenty-man melee.”

Bruce jumped up from the cot, and paced over to the full-length mirror next to the doorway of the medbay.

“More than fine,” Bruce murmured, as he turned his back to see. He smoothed his hand over the undamaged skin on his back. “It’s a miracle, apparently.” 

* * *

The perimeter cameras pinged in the middle of Bruce’s night, which coincided with mid-morning hours for the Gotham work-a-day world. Within seconds, Bruce had jolted awake and was peeling a paper report from the side of his face and smoothing back his hair and straightening his white button-up as if any of these things made a material difference when coming face-to-face with a man he’d tried to kill a week ago. The cameras tracked a streaking white light passing over the face of the water. The light slowed as it dove under the surface; a minute later, the underwater cameras picked up a small, struggling body; and a minute after that, Bruce could track the progress with his own eyes. 

When Bruce took a more objective view of what was about to happen, it was awe-inspiring--something that he would likely treasure in the years to come. The day Bruce Wayne got a second chance. Up close: that second chance fell through the Cave ceiling like a star, and only stopped when it hit the grating of the Batmobile ramp with a heavy _thwap_. 

The sound of wet, damp retching had Bruce down the stairs with one of Alfred’s towels for the Batmobile before Clark had finished coughing up water. For a moment, Clark curled in on himself, his eyes open, glassy, unseeing. Then--he pulled in a shuddering breath, and his body relaxed in fractions. 

Bruce could see too much like this: how his skin tone was returning to Kryptonian-normal, (or human-normal), losing its blue pallor; how the stubble on Clark’s face had grown in, as though time had passed for him; how the places where Clark’s back had been bit into by the grating--red, angry, and bleeding. 

_Bleeding._

That arrested Bruce’s entire train of thought.

“I’m going to touch you,” Bruce announced, and Clark startled at the voice. 

Bruce was kneeling, manhandling Clark up from the grating, before Clark gave a fairly quiet, _okay._ And Clark was--wincing. Then limping. He took the stairs in visible pain. Bruce pulled a hand away from his back after he’d supported him from a misstep, tacky with blood and sweat. The wrongness of it burned in Bruce’s throat. 

“Any chance that your ramp is made out of Kryptonite?” Clark asked sheepishly, as Bruce stationed him on the cot, still as naked as he had been in the warehouse, but just more--now that he wasn’t a glowing battery. 

Bruce swallowed down a _what do you think, boy scout?_ and simply shook his head in the negative. He held out the towel to Clark, who looked at it with incomprehension for a moment. 

“Oh,” Clark said. “Right. Sorry, it’s been months without--” He bit the words off. “Well, you know. It’s been a while. It’s--God, it’s good to see you again, Bruce.” He laid a shockingly tangible arm on Bruce’s own.

“Clark,” Bruce said, once he was reasonably sure his voice wouldn’t break. “How long has it been for you.”

“Time works a little different there, but--” Clark paused. “The Carrier said it had been seven months.” 

“It’s been three days since we buried you,” Bruce said carefully. “As far as _I_ know, you’re still in the ground. In Smallville.” 

“Oh. _Oh._ ” A deep blue flush rose into Clark’s skin as he looked abashed--then _mortified._ Clark grabbed for the towel, and fastened it around his waist. But it was too late; his skin faded to that glassy transparency he had had in the warehouse, and the towel dropped through Clark’s lap to the cot. “Dammit,” he whispered, with a nervous laugh that relaxed into something closer to delight as Clark inspected his hands again. “Hey, at least I’m not bleeding any more.”

Bruce could actually see that. The moment Clark had--phased--or--lost tangibility--his skin had healed over and the pinch of pain had eased from his face. 

There were an uncomfortable number of things that Bruce noticed about Clark’s body in the time it took for him to glance away. Alfred was coming down the lift. Right. It was about the time of day that he arrived to begin the morning’s work on the new high-tensile line for the grapnel guns. And here was Bruce’s chance. Too little sleep, and too little time to calcify the revelation he’d shared with Diana at Clark’s grave had made all of Bruce’s reactions suspect. Whatever Bruce might be feeling--what the situation needed now was someone with clarity. Not-- _this._

By way of introduction to what had become of Bruce’s life, he made a vague gesture towards the med bay, naked intangible Clark, life in general, and said: “Alfred, you deal with this.”

“Ahh,” Alfred exclaimed. After all of these years, it was good to know that Alfred could still be lost for words. 

He breezed by Alfred--who murmured as Bruce was retreating into the Cave: 

“And to think, Dick says that you never give me anything.”

Louder, but no less distant, he heard: “Mr. Kent, I presume? Alfred Pennyworth, in charge of Kitchen, Workshop, and Armory. An unexpected pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Hmm? Well, I wouldn’t dwell on that. Predicting Master Wayne’s moods are about as useful as forecasting the weather in a desert. Now, let’s see what we can do about pants.”

* * *

In the lowest level of the Cave, in a drained-out section of the Workshop's foundation--deep enough that Bruce had to climb down three emergency ladders to reach it--Bruce meditated in his private chamber. The chamber had no lights, no furniture. Only a single tatami mat for meditation. The silence of the cement-lined walls echoed Bruce’s breathing back at him in the close warmth of the earth. 

Ten years ago, Bruce had excavated a part of the Cave that lay directly over a thermal spring. He had found a natural cavern that kept warm even when the rest of the Cave had taken on the usual late autumn/early winter chill. At the time, he had thought of building living quarters down here; so that, after his boys had grown, and the need for playing Bruce Wayne had diminished, he could retire into the darkness of the Cave. In the end, Bruce had chosen to sleep on the cot in the medbay, and he’d transformed the cavern into some more useful.

Bruce came here when he sought the kind of clarity that was sometimes only possible in dreams, or in the deprivation of all other senses. Right now, he desperately needed an anchor.

Bruce breathed out, and listened to the sound of his breath. 

He was alive. (All things considered: not the only possible outcome of the night.) 

He was a part of the world. (One among many.) 

Grief bubbled beneath the surface of his thoughts. (But--not the only object in his mind.) 

Love existed here too. His love for Alfred, for Dick, for Gotham. Bruce examined each of them. In his mind, they took the form of trees. Stately, towering, with roots into the deepest part of his body. Something else was growing here too: it had rooted in the cracked, barren soil; had begun winding itself around the base of the trees. Tendrils of it reached out to Bruce as he shook the vines with a growing sense unease. 

He knew what this was too. (How young and fresh it was--how surprisingly untainted by fear.) 

(It had only been a week!

\--or had it been growing all of this time, underneath a more paralyzing grief--that had disguised when it had taken root.)

He ran his fingers over a small bud on the tallest vine, preparing to flower.

A man’s self-deception could only take him so far: his self-control had to carry him the rest of the way. A man who was not his friend, was not human, was still one of the most dangerous beings on the planet, had come back to life. Without explanation for how. Thus far, he’d acted nothing like Superman. What Bruce needed to be was objective; he needed to keep his distance; he needed to have a plan in place for the worst possible outcome that could happen because Clark (or something that looked like Clark) was alive. Against that logic, emotion must be a non-factor. 

This, too, was a skill that Bruce did not find difficult to perform, having practiced it with a casual ease over the past twenty years. He plucked the flower from the vine and watched it crumble in the barren dust. 

  


* * *

  


Clark hadn’t gotten a clear look at Bruce Wayne’s house as he had plunged from the sky (quite possibly while on fire) the previous night, but now that he had time to investigate it in the clear light of morning, Clark found himself in one of the most depressing places that he had ever set foot. None of Bruce Wayne’s celebrity profiles had run a picture of this structure. The stark modernism of glass houses normally made Clark a little wistful, but this particular glass house filled Clark with an existential despair. Where was the hope for growth, life, change? All the house could ever be was what it contained, and everything that Bruce Wayne had loved--everything his parents had given him--had burned with Wayne Manor.

A grimace flitted across his face. The only reason Clark knew that was because _his_ Bruce--or rather _future_ Bruce had told him that one night while he, Diana, and Clark had reviewed the JL roster over pizza and cold breadsticks. 

A future that he had perhaps put in jeopardy simply by being alive in the past. 

Out on the balcony, Clark hovered over the dock. He had hoped that soaking up in the sunlight might help him achieve tangibility--but the rays couldn’t even touch him in this between state. He hadn’t figured out how to wear clothing yet, but he had learned that if he floated under things--like say a chaise longue--he could at least provide the lesser of two shocks. Seeing a ghostly hand pop out through a chair would probably be less distressing to both Alfred and Bruce than a floating nude sunbather. 

(And wasn’t that one interesting piece of information that future Bruce hadn’t shared with him. For all of his talk of being a playboy--that was all it was. Talk.)

After some amount of fumbling, and a great deal of concentration, Clark was able to drag a Bat-branded voice-recorder outside and press record. 

What would Batman value most from the future? Methodical intel on the next fifteen months. With as little preamble as he could muster, Clark outlined the next fifteen months from memory--much of it pulled from Batman’s own case files that had counted for team-bonding time.

(Clark carefully talked around any mention of the Bleed, or what he’d seen there. He wasn’t sure he had the words to describe the Escher-esque vistas that tangled with a hundred irrealities, how he could taste colors as they flowed through the colorless plain, how his bitterness had taken flight as a flock of angry clouds, mocking and encouraging him to find his way home. He had spent most of his months onboard a sapient ship, whom asked him to call it The Carrier, and had kept him in high spirits as they searched for Clark’s reality out of the numberless number of bifurcating worlds. 

Clark suspected that knowledge would have been a little much for a man who was just starting to accept _alien_ and _non-hostile_ could exist together in the same thought.)

There wasn’t much flavor Clark could add; he was dead for most of it. Alive for a month with powers on the fritz, when--something about the way he had resurrected had super-charged his cell-structure. An attack by a metahuman that channeled electricity. That’s all it had taken. Clark had been blasted out of phase, and now he was back in the past, often (literally) blue, and intangible. 

It was a fairly depressing set of circumstances, all told, but he couldn’t help feeling excitement bubble through him. 

This Bruce hadn’t undergone the transformation that his had--a year’s worth of keeping peace in a post-Superman world, metahumans crawling out of the woodworks, the threats that Lex had called to the planet--it was enough to harden anyone’s heart. Here, in this time, Bruce may still be grieving Clark’s death, but he was somehow more alive for it. 

That, more than anything else, nurtured the small tendril of Clark’s hope. 

* * *

Bruce shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on Superman. But Clark Kent, lying under a chaise longue had no such advantage over Bruce. He caught Clark mid-sentence--one of his arms casually dangling through the chair. Bruce pressed his lips together, and tried not to point out it was actually worse to see disembodied body parts sticking through the furniture.

“Clark,” Bruce said, sharper than he had intended. “Please--don’t.” 

Clark did the intangible equivalent of falling out of his chair. Then righted himself, and floated above the cushion. Bruce was confronted with the nudity problem again; but at least it was less difficult to confront than the painful reminder of Superman’s broken arm wrenched out its socket by Doomsday.

“Could you--” Clark motioned the voice recorder. Bruce stopped recording, and hefted the device in his hands. 

“Did you touch this?” 

“Yes, sorry, Alfred said it would be okay if I borrowed a few of this things--”

“No. I mean, _did you physically move this?_ ”

Clark answered in the affirmative. He had concentrated, and he had achieved limited interaction with the material plane. It--answered one of the questions he had had. 

Bruce stared at the voice recorder--it gave him something to do, aside from gaze stoically away from Clark’s body--as he fiddled with its recording stats. Three hours of data on it. This could prove...enlightening. “I spent this morning analyzing your blood. It’s basically human. No markers of Kryptonian DNA.”

“That holds with the results that I--” Clark backtracked immediately. “I mean, _interesting_.” 

“You knew.” It was surprising. Even moreso: Bruce let himself sound surprised. 

“I knew,” Clark confirmed. He seemed sheepish about it, as though a sudden facility in biochemical analysis was a thing worth keeping secret. “Still, I had to wonder how accurate those results could be if--” He waves at himself.

“Metahumans _do_ exist, Clark. I’ve located a few of them--”

Clark lit up, and nearly mouthed a name--but bit back that piece of information. “I--uh--I talk about the metahumans. On the recorder. Give it a listen when you have the time. I’m not sure how my presence here affects time, but I’ve got at least a basic handle on your major cases for the next fifteen months.” Clark smiled here--remembering a Bruce who isn’t him--and it shouldn’t sting as Clark’s eyes turned fond. “It’s funny, all you ever like to talk about are cases. I suppose it’s your way of, uh, being close. To people.” 

He was glowing again; the autumn sun scattered over skin it couldn’t touch, radiant with its own inner light. It was insufferable. 

“Why are you here,” Bruce ground out.

Clark scratched his nose in the best impression of polite disinterest Bruce had seen in ages. “I summoned an interdimensional Door, and it dropped me in the wrong time.” 

Bruce’s eyelids fluttered with the annoyance that was building in him. “The question wasn’t: why did you come back. The question was, why did you come back _here?_ ” Bruce cleared his throat. “You have...people.” 

Not many, to be sure; maybe exactly the number of people Bruce had. Lois Lane and Martha Kent. His partner, his mother, both bent in shared grief over Clark’s casket. He knew how keen their pain was because he had witnessed it, felt it from outside. 

(That he had felt his own private grief was immaterial; it was the grief of potential. A future ally. Perhaps, even a friend. Maybe even a--but anything more hadn’t been worth dwelling on. 

That Clark was alive and not with them--) 

“The man they love is still dead,” Clark said, looking surprised at himself as he said it. 

Bruce parsed that one with difficulty--in the Bat's mind, one Clark was equal to any other _Clark_ , with preferential treatment accruing to this one by the simple fact that he was alive.

“It’s true,” Clark pressed. “He hasn’t--woken up yet. Grieved for them. Met them again as a new person. Met the people they’ll become. I--I wouldn’t deprive him of that memory for anything in the world.” 

Bruce refused to repeat the question again; it already had taken on too much of the overtones of the questions he refused to ask (Was it an accident that you came to me? Was I simply closest to reentry?)--but apparently Clark’s mind had worked along the same path, arriving at a similar conclusion from alternate data.

Clark laughed, a startled, disbelieving thing, as he hopped up onto his feet (even if they currently went through the deck). He put his hands out to Bruce, not touching his shoulders, but clearly wishing that he could. The space of inches separated them. “Whatever you’re thinking, no. Bruce, I spent seven months _searching for you_. I may have gotten the wrong time, but--you have to know. I wanted to find you.” 

It was the blindingly wrong thing to say. Bruce found reasons to brood in the Cave for the rest of the day. Anywhere but the overwhelming light of that lakeshore balcony and the impossible promise it carried for a man that wasn’t him. 

* * *

Bruce listened to the voice recorder. The earthy tones of Clark’s Midwestern accent faded at times into a more coldly commanding voice that reported action in the clipped tones of someone who had witnessed as much raw inhumanity as Bruce had. But that darkness never lingered for long. Clark’s voice dug deep into Bruce, and pierced what it found there with sunlight. He didn’t let Alfred transcribe the recording until he had listened through enough times to memorizing the cadence of Clark’s speech, how it turned playful whenever he spoke of his League, his Bruce. 

It was an important skill, after all; identifying a person by their voice alone. 

* * *

It took only a week for Bruce to crack from whatever Clark had done to earn the freeze-out. He wasn’t familiar with it from personal experience, but Alfred’s numerous tales about Bruce’s father-son relationships had given Clark a clue that that’s what had been happening when Bruce always seemed to be elsewhere--even on the day that Clark had sat in the chair in front of the Batcomputer. (“Don’t let him hear you call it that, Master Kent. He calls it the Terminal.”) With uncanny timing, Bruce had discovered a case that required an all-night stakeout of the gun-runners new base of operations. 

Bruce’s distant but unrelenting animosity would have simply become another fact that Clark had collected about This Bruce, but on the seventh day, he descended the stairs to find Clark floating cross-legged over the ledge--half in, half out of the glass--and Bruce had broken. 

“I can train you,” were the first words out of his mouth. 

Fight training seemed to be the single most absurd thing that Clark could do with his time, since he hadn’t been able to touch anything since the voice recorder. But Bruce had a different idea of utility. He showed up the next morning in the training room with two tatami mats, a pair of loose sweatpants and long-sleeved workout shirt. 

Clark mirrored Bruce’s posture, pressing the soles of his feet together. 

“I will teach you control,” Bruce stated. “Control the emotion, and you control the body. Are you ready?” 

“Meditation.” Clark may have snorted derisively.

“Yes,” Bruce agreed with the word, but not Clark’s tone. 

Bruce led them through two different breathing katas, combining stretches with deep breathing, and the release of emotional tension as each phase of the kata was completed. By the end of it, Clark noticed that his feet were touching ground. Not hovering over it, not sinking through it. He could still see the tatami mats through his skin, but it was progress. Clark didn’t mock the suggestion when Bruce asked him to join in his katas the next day, or the next.

Two weeks of patient release of emotional tension passed; katas in the morning before Bruce's morning coffee, afternoon breathing exercises before Bruce began his warm-up routine on the uneven bars. After each session, Clark felt slightly more tethered to this world. Not too long after Clark successfully _leaned against a wall for five minutes_ , Clark blinked opened his eyes from the final movement of the blue dragon kata to find that the hairs on his arm were prickling. His skin felt like it was on fire. No, it felt _chilly_ because the Cave was drafty in the autumn.

Clark slapped his hand against a barbel in triumph, and immediately stuffed it into his mouth to suck it when the skin broke. (He'd seen Other Bruce do it countless times.) 

Bruce didn’t look as relieved as Clark might have expected him too. Instead, he looked comically betrayed, before smoothing his expression into mild disapproval. He hustled Clark into an extra pair of workout clothing, and then briefly, lightly, settled a hand on Clark’s shoulder while Clark sat--actually sat!--on the weight-training benches. 

“Control,” Bruce said. “It’s what makes everything we do possible.” 

And Clark would have agreed to anything at that point--touching _everything_ seemed like a brilliant use of his time--so when Bruce said, “Now let’s test it,” Clark eagerly agreed.

That was Clark's first mistake. The next day, instead of the reassuring presence of the tatami, Bruce laid down a thick blue sparring mat. Bruce demonstrated a few basic rolls, how to fall, how to avoid injury in basic grapple scenarios. No touching--just light demos. And then Bruce arranged them together for a quick throw tutorial.

The second mistake was that Clark was _unprepared_. He hadn't thought about what it would feel like to be touched, after eight months without another’s hand on his body. 

Bruce’s hands came up to Clark’s shoulders as he threw him, and then sunk his fingers down into the divots of his clavicle, knees clenching his flank in a punishing grip. 

Clark looked up into the face of everything he could have wanted--the color high on Bruce’s cheeks in his petty triumph, a line of sweat dripping from his gray-tinged bangs, crinkling at the corner of his eyes (because Bruce was grinning at him, even if his mouth stayed frozen in its customary grimace)--and Clark let go. Bruce’s hand sunk through Clark’s body at the same time that his clothing settled to the floor. 

Naked and painfully hard, Clark smiled up at him, because--hey, mistakes happen. That was when Clark caught an emotion he’d never seen before on Bruce’s face: a flash of pure fear. Breathing hard, Bruce hadn’t been able to tear his eyes from Clark, and Clark had to roll out from under Bruce before he could control himself enough to re-materialize.

Neither of them looked at the other as Clark dressed, and, the next day, he was greeted with the return of the tatami mats. 

* * *

Bruce wasn’t paranoid enough to believe that an unseen conspiracy of the universe served to defy him even in his rock-bottom expectations--but he allowed himself that uncharitable thought when the Russians and the new players (who now called themselves Intergang) set up another gun buy in his city. Anti-personnel mines, armor piercing rounds, and a surplus M777. How the gun-runners ran military tech through the military checkpoints--timed to precise shift-changes--pointed to corruption that the Batman would have to address soon. He wasn’t eager to tangle with the US Government directly, but if military corruption impacted Gotham or Metropolis, it was fair game for the Bat. 

For now, Bruce focused on the guns themselves. 

Clark’s control was still shaky, but he had convinced Bruce--patiently, with repeated gently application of touch (to his shoulder, to his wrist, to an elbow)--that he could accompany Bruce as a backup pilot. 

Bruce had had reservations, but he trusted Clark’s word. He was still (mostly) human. There seemed to be no chance that Clark would fall from the Batwing like an avenging angel when Bruce took his first knife wound--when, in all of their training, had Clark learned to control his intangibility that precisely? He whirled through the melee, punching, kicking, savagely disarming all comers. Until one shift--Clark seemed to go completely transparent, there was a gentle _twang_ , and he was gone. 

The bloodcurdling cry that ripped from Bruce’s throat spooked the remaining sentries, but Bruce barely had time to care; he rejoined the fray, blood singing in his veins. 

* * *

Clark knew he wasn’t going to hit anywhere good. The colorless hills of the Bleed tessellated their welcome into a stunning forest of broken metaphors. Claws scraped at him as he crashed through their brittle forms, the cuts healing almost instantaneously. Remembering Bruce’s lessons about throwing opponents, Clark tucked into a ball, rolled, and hit the ground running.

All Clark needed to remember was that Bruce needed him. 

* * *

Grief during battle was self-indulgence. A sentry down, Bruce grabbed his knife and flung it at another guard, who was reloading. 

Self-indulgence was the opposite of control.

Bruce was in control.

He snarled, and slammed a man’s head through a window.

* * *

In the Bleed, Clark shifted to little effect. Except now he was flying, untethered to the Bleed’s idea of ground. The stars of a million million universes whizzed by him in winged clusters. Soon, he approached the end of color, of air, of space. A vast devouring maelstrom sucked in everything it touched.

No! Clark raged, as he felt the storm catch his foot. It doesn’t end here!

Rearing back, Clark did the only thing that made sense--he cocked a fist, and smashed the center of maelstrom right down its center. The storm burst into the incandescent rain, and Clark found himself back in the brabble forest where he first appeared. Caught at the end of time, and the end of the universe, and Bruce needed him--Clark sobbed out his frustration and despair. 

**WHY HAVE YOU RETURNED HERE, KAL-EL?**

Clark blinked through the prickling tears. 

“Carrier?!”

**I AM WITH YOU, KAL-EL. CALL FOR ME, AND WE TRAVEL WITH YOU.**

“I need to return to my world--the exact moment I disappeared, or the closest to it!” Clark turned around in a circle, but all he could see were the metaphors chittering noisily in their trees. “I can’t see you--where are you?”

The ponderous bulk of the Carrier crested the hill--the miles, and miles long shift-ship gleaming in no light. Clark shifted, and leapt for it, as it carried him away from the Maelstorm of Despair, and toward the ever-shifting membrane between the Bleed and the universes it touched.

* * *

The guards put up a good fight, but honestly--the Russians were scraping bottom with these men. Or perhaps, in Bruce’s desperation, nothing could stand against him. 

This time, when it happened, there was no miscalculation--he had simply been out-maneuvered by someone who had their one lucky day. Worst-case scenario for a worst-case scenario. The armor piercing bullet tore through the air towards Bruce’s heart. He was aware of its movement, and equally aware that he couldn’t possibly move fast enough to dodge it. Bruce was--after all-- human. 

Something spitting fucking mad around him wasn’t human. The heat of a star engulfed him, burning him inside out. With the rush of heat and light, Clark phased through Bruce, and pushed him down to his knees with the easy strength of Superman. The bullet struck Clark center mass, and splintered in his chest. 

Not like Superman at all, as it turned out. 

The anger rose out of Bruce like a viscous bile. Bruce had the shooter on his knees, head between his hands.

“Don’t kill him,” Clark wheezed. “I’ll be--” and he toppled through the floor. 

Bruce gritted his teeth, and considered Clark’s request. He was trying to be a good man. It was what the world deserved from him. Some days, the world tested him. He would do something more about it--in the morning, most likely. For now, he handcuffed the shooter to the crates, and went down to fetch his now-naked, passed out sidekick who was never, in the entire breadth of history, going to be allowed to ride in the Batwing again.

  


* * *

  


Clark walked easily into the training room. After running the length of an alternate dimension, the trip from the medical cot was a small relief. One foot in front of the other, connecting to the sharp chill of the Cave floor. He was solid. Whole. In this world. 

The weight training gear had been shuffled to the side of the room; in the center, there was a microfiber desk chair, just like the chair at the Terminal, and a small table beside it. The meditation mats had been rolled up and stationed behind the free weights. Dropping to the floor, he pulled his legs into lotus position and waited. Alfred wouldn’t arrive for morning repairs for another hour, and Bruce wouldn’t be awake until it tipped into afternoon. 

With the same nostalgia anyone has for hard work long finished, Clark missed early morning chores on the farm. Lifting and loading grain, mucking stalls, milking the cows, feeding the newly-hatched chicks in their heated brood boxes. At least when Alfred arrived, he could lift the individual parts of the Batmobile chassis (even if it’s only a few inches off the ground), could run simple searches on the Terminal, could offer tentative advice about the limits of certain technologies. He wasn’t an expert. But the months alone on the Carrier had given him time to make headway on certain practical sciences. 

He was certain Bruce would approve. 

After the space of twenty cycles of deep breathing and release, Bruce materialized behind him--that was the best description for it. Between the space of heart beats, Clark had been alone, and then the subtle electric connection that he felt with Bruce had snapped open. 

Clark forced his shoulders to relax, and craned his head to look up at him. Clark thought: surely, a month would be enough time to become accustomed to anything. The other Bruce had become accustomed to Clark’s presence after a mere week of Clark popping into the Cave for status updates on the scout ship’s recovery, but this Bruce--who had stretched with him in the training room every day--meditated with him every day--taken coffee with him at the stroke of midnight on the roof of a Gotham high-rise--watched him streak through the sky like a star--studied his face like it was an entirely new phenomenon. 

It filled Clark with a buoyant kind of hope. Whatever their problems were--Clark couldn’t help but reach for the kind of golly-gee kindness that set Bruce’s teeth on edge.

“Didn’t know bats were diurnal,” Clark said cheerfully, by way of greeting. “Three shots of ristretto?”

“Morning people,” Bruce muttered (almost) out of the range of his human hearing. He moved to stand next to the chair. The sleeves of his button-up were rolled to his elbows, and the pleats in his dress slacks had lost their crisp peaks. He looked--rumpled. He had disappeared somewhere last night, and Alfred had stopped Clark from following him. Had Bruce even slept?

“Thanks, by the way. For last night. For the--” Clark tried to clarify, but trailed off as he watched Bruce’s face shutter. Apparently it was too early in the morning for earnestness. Or thanks. 

Bruce inclined his head towards the chair. “Have a seat, Clark.” He set a small leather bag on the table. “Today, we’re working on control.”

“Funny--” Clark grinned at him openly now--“I thought the meditation was for control.”

“I know you take a dim view of it, but if you don’t practice, Clark, you can’t predict your reactions.” Bruce stepped closer to him, came right up into his space, and Clark felt the distance close like a magnetic pull. The color began to rise in his skin--the blue flush spreading up his throat--and Bruce blinked. And then he stepped away. “Control isn’t about not feeling. It’s about not reacting.” 

The tingling preceded a phase shift intensified, and then smoothed into low, sensitive hum of energy across his skin. Clark shivered with it, the sensation of Bruce’s body pressed up against his lingering. “And this is a skill you’ve practiced.” 

“ _Mastered._ ”

Clark hummed back his non-agreement; had seen a bit of Bruce’s not-reacting in the warehouse last night.

“Sit.” Bruce pointed at the chair; it wasn’t a request. Clark fought with the mulish part of him that had never taken kindly to direct orders. This was obviously important to Bruce, so it was important to Clark, too. He sat in the chair. 

Bruce turned away from him. “Strip from the waist up.”

“Is this part of the--”-- _test? challenge?_ \--Clark’s mind supplied, but neither seemed right.

“I’d rather not ruin another shirt if I don’t have to,” Bruce replied, easy, his request the definition of reason. 

Bruce unpacking the small leather case. A lather brush, a straight-edge razor, a small metal dish, a stand, a soap tin, a leather strop, a small cloth. It didn’t look like the kind of case--or the kind of tools--that a ultra-high-end socialite would use. This kit looked…well-used. Humble. Clark craned his neck, and caught the honey leather case from Bruce’s hands. A fairly plain TW was embossed into the leather. _Thomas Wayne_. Clark froze for a moment with the imagined trespass he’d made, but Bruce didn’t say anything, and Clark didn’t ask. He handed the case back to Bruce without comment. 

When Bruce had finished lining up his tools, Clark saw the almost imperceptible rise of his back--a sigh, or a deep breath, and then--Bruce was fidgeting with the front of his shirt. Unbuttoning it, Clark realized, because then Bruce was yanking it off his shoulders. A white undershirt followed--wadded up and discarded. 

Clark’s mouth dried up, and he swallowed against it. 

Corded muscle flexed as Bruce rolled his shoulders, tension playing under his lightly scarred skin. He ran through a quick upper-body stretch routine that Bruce had drilled into Clark--delts, lats, traps, tense and release. Distantly, Clark realized this was the first time he had ever seen Bruce undressed. Somehow, Bruce didn’t seem any more exposed when he was shirtless than he did wrapped in grey carbon fiber. 

Finally, Bruce turned back to Clark. Clark’s eyes jumped from the scars thickly knotted along his collarbone down along the deep cut of muscle that had been trained and maintained for violence. The Batsuit, apparently, didn’t exaggerate. 

“You’re still clothed.” 

Bruce sounded annoyed, but by then, all that Clark could think to say--before he could convince himself that it was a bad idea, because teasing about too close to the truth was always a bad idea--“Are pants optional?”

* * *

Traditionally, Bruce conducted the test of control with something suited to the personality of the student. 

(For Dick, it had been a balance test. Bruce had driven a single pole into the ground. With one leg bound, Dick was left to balance for twenty-four hours. Dick wasn’t to know that Bruce kept vigil from a perch in a nearby tree. When Dick had fidgeted badly enough to smack face-first into the dirt, he had scrambled his way back onto it without the use of his legs. The kid had earned points for perseverance. 

For Jason, it had been a test of patience. He’d set a pysanka, decorated with the colorful batik motifs of traditional Ukrainian design, in his palm, and asked him to hold it for the space of a day. Bruce had discreetly left a basket of them by the door of the old training room; by the time Bruce returned, the basket had been depleted, crushed egg shells littering the room like snow. Still--Jason had the egg he began with left in his hand--whole and unbroken.) 

Bruce had spent a fitful night in the meditation room, reaching for the serenity of being one with his breath--and running smack against his memory. Last night had seared itself in his memory: Clark, shifting to another dimension. Bruce, in the path of a bullet. Clark, shifting _through_ him to take the blow to his heart. Bruce, forced to his knees. Clark, his heart’s blood on the warehouse floor. 

It had been fine. 

Clark had been fine. 

But for a moment, he had watched it happen again, and-- 

Control had deserted Bruce. 

That’s why Bruce had chosen this test. Control of motor skills. Control of body. Clark would have to stay tangible while someone was touching him, while Bruce was touching him, and he’d have to understand the limits of his own body. He bled. He broke. He died. Jesus, he had died. 

That too-bright grin, the tease of Clark’s tongue as he flicked it against his lips, the joking tone, _Are pants optional?_

It was imperative that Bruce internalize that control, and fast.

* * *

Bruce gazed at him levelly as the joke went over as well as a lead balloon. Clark chose to undress while Bruce stropped the blade. A few buttons, and then it was off. Despite the dampness of the Cave and the chill of the late autumn, Clark had no undershirt to remove. In truth, he barely felt the temperature--which was standing the hair on Bruce’s arm up on end--as more than a slightly cool touch against his skin. So he sat in the chair, half-naked, until Bruce had finished honing the steel.

“Do you know how this works?” Bruce asked, tapping the lather brush against the foaming soap. 

“Are you genuinely curious?” 

“Before--” Clark took the pause for what it was, Bruce remembering the _before._ “I’d never seen you anything but clean-shaven. Your hair appeared to be just as invulnerable as the rest of you.” 

“I’ve shaved, Bruce,” Clark replied, amused. He rubbed a hand through the thick stubble on his chin, longer than it had been in years. Maybe someday he’d tell Bruce about his drifting days, swap for the tantalizing glimpses that Bruce had allowed him to see about his own past.

“I couldn’t be sure,” Bruce said.

Picking up the brush and its dish, Bruce walked around to the front of his legs. No, this couldn’t be right--barbers generally stood to the side, didn’t they? But Bruce had a knee in-between his legs, sliding them open, relentless. 

“Superman always looked so clean-shaven. Maybe you didn’t grow facial hair, as a Kryptonian. Maybe you didn’t need to shave. Maybe it was just one more thing that set you apart from us.”

Clark swallowed as Bruce caught his chin, and the point of contact widened from a gentle hum of background static to a jolt that cut through Clark’s spine. To his great relief, Clark kept his body calm and in contact with the chair as Bruce lathered his face from the circle of his legs. 

“It doesn’t grow very quickly compared to--” He didn’t want to say _humans._ That would imply he’s not one of them. “--What I’ve seen. My Pa, for one. Usually only have to do it once a month, tops.”

Bruce set aside the brush and the dish. He took Clark’s chin in a firm grip. “What do you use?” 

“Kryptonian steel,” Clark breathed, barely a whisper. “A piece of scrap metal from the scout ship. It keeps its edge fine, and it’s the only thing that cuts my skin, without--” 

The razor slid over Clark’s skin, and again in another clean pass. He turned Clark’s chin, and repeated the motions for the other cheek. Sliding his finger up his throat, Bruce tipped Clark’s head back, and the blade stroked down the skin of his throat. 

There was truly very little similarity between now and the only other time that Bruce had had a hand on his throat--and that had been in the context of Bruce trying to kill him. Clark had struggled under the haze of Kryptonite gas--struggled and collapsed. Never had he experienced the grasping, insidious pain of Kryptonite; his body had felt so vulnerable. He still could remember the feel of it: a gloved hand on the column of his throat, so gentle--so at odds with how Batman had thrown him over the balcony. 

Maybe it was how vulnerable Clark felt under Bruce’s blade now. Some connecting thread recontextualized the feeling of _terror, panic._ Now it felt--it felt--Clark experienced the gentle, gloved grip on his throat again as though no time at all had passed between the two moments. The feeling of it shot straight to his cock, and he gasped. 

Clark couldn’t stop it this time. The telltale blue flush unfurled from his heart--spread up his neck--down his chest--but he didn’t give in to the tingling pressure. His skin stayed in contact with the chair. 

“Interesting,” Bruce murmured, as he wiped the razor down, and snapped it shut. “The flush starts at your heart. Is there a physical component to when you shift? Was it the feeling of physical danger?”

“Maybe,” Clark hedged. 

If Bruce pressed in any further, he wouldn’t be able to deny the source of that physical component.

He shifted minutely in the chair, and Bruce resumed the closing ritual of the shave, toweling down Clark’s face, hooking a finger underneath his chin, tilting his head from one side to the other, to study the closeness of the shave.

“Fit for society,” was Bruce’s final judgment. 

Clark rubbed a hand over the sensitized skin, and wondered if it looked as raw as it felt. Bruce didn’t pull away. He watched Clark’s hand with a sharpening intensity as it dropped to his throat, and it felt like the simplest thing to let his legs fall open a little wider, for Bruce to lean closer. 

Clark didn’t do that. 

No. 

That would have been undemanding. Unpresupposing. Instead Clark squeezed his ankles behind Bruce as a warning. Bruce took the challenge for what it was, broke the hold with a simple throw, and had packed up the shaving kit toiletries before Clark could pick himself up off the floor. 

“Ouch,” Clark said, chafing at his arms. 

* * *

That would have been the end of it, Clark thought--Bruce rebuffing him in terms even his cheerful Kryptonian countenance could understand--but after Bruce had packed up the kit, returned the chair to the Workshop, he lingered in the doorway to the training room. 

Bruce’s body was deceptively limber; Clark had only ever seen him that relaxed when he was poised on the cusp of danger. 

“An experiment?” Bruce proposed lightly.

Clark recognized that tone. The one that Bruce used on Alfred over the comms before he did something massively unwise. 

“What kind of experiment?” he asked suspiciously. 

“I need to prepare it first,” was Bruce’s only reply. “Tomorrow. The lowest level of the Workshop. Borrow something light.” 

Clark saw no other choice before him; he agreed. 

* * *

The day passed fitfully as the idea of the experiment took root in Clark’s mind. Did Bruce want to test his abilities to phase? Did he want to monitor his biorhythms--perhaps slap a bodycam on him and push him into the Bleed? That possibility set Clark’s palms sweating with fear. He’d returned from nullspace twice--and he was not optimistic that he would encounter his rescuer a third time.

That night, Clark was on comms. He hadn’t sustained any damage in the melee with the Russians, but neither Alfred nor Bruce were going to suffer him in the field. Under Alfred’s guidance, he watched the cameras. Clark pointed out access points, targets, distances, unexpected guards. Alfred murmured a few suggestions, but for the most part kept a silent watch on Clark himself. It was human traffickers this time. Clark swore when he saw the cargo containers pop open, and girls and boys no older than twelve flood out. 

His blood was still up when the Batmobile pulled up on the ramp, and Bruce hopped out, the cowl ripped off his head, and discarded on the floor before he made it up to the terminal.

“Now,” Bruce said.

Clark repeated the word back at him as a question, because he didn’t understand at first--until he did. The experiment. So they weren’t going to wait. That was fine by Clark; he didn’t want to spend the night tying himself into knots.

* * *

At the end of the ramp, there was a ladder. Bruce scaled it easily, and Clark trailed afterward. They climbed down into a pocket of rock that was hidden by the overhang of the emergency walkway. Down, down, down, until they touched bottom in a passageway of glimmering rock, worn smooth by the action of water over millions of years. The only light was the dusky cant of the floodlight three stories above them. Still, Clark could see Bruce perfectly well in the darkness. Bruce slapped a hand against a bioscanner, and a door hissed open. Clark took the sweep of Bruce’s arm as an invitation and stepped into the room. The door hissed closed behind them, and they were sealed into the dark.

Clark’s eyes, impossibly, adjusted. He could see Bruce perfectly well against the paint of darkness. But--how? Wasn't Clark basically human? 

“There are no lights,” Bruce murmured. “So don’t ask.” 

He could hear Bruce’s heart beat racing in his chest.

“Find the mat, and sit.” 

Clark saw the only furnishing in the room: a single tatami mat. He did as he was instructed.

“The experiment, Bruce,” Clark fumbled, “I don’t--I mean--I trust you, but--” 

Bruce closed his eyes. “This experiment isn’t for you.” 

“Oh.” 

“I mean--it is--but--” Bruce’s hands flexed, and pain flashed across his face. “You’re not sitting,” he said urgently, because Clark had stood.

There was much that Clark was willing to endure. He’d taken a bullet to his heart, because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. But he wouldn’t endure this. Clark’s hands found the catches on Bruce’s gauntlets--a nearly invisible lock just underneath the wrist, and he pressed them in. The gloves disengaged, and Clark pulled one off and then the other. In shock, Bruce just--let him. 

The armored vambraces came off in two sections.

“Bruce,” Clark said. “Why don’t you tell me why you brought me here.”

“What’s the opposite of control,” Bruce asked, low.

“Chaos,” Clark answered, as he found the tiny zipper that ran up the back of Bruce’s forearms and triceps like a vein. He traced their path to other nearly-invisible zippers, like contour lines over his form. 

Bruce didn’t even bother to contradict Clark. “Desperation,” Bruce answered, instead. “Desperation is the opposite of control.” 

Clark ran his finger along the path of the zipper, down his abdomen, and over his thighs.

“What are you doing to me, Clark?” 

“I thought I’d unzip this suit,” Clark said conversationally, as if there wasn’t just as much at stake for him, too. 

Bruce made a wounded noise at the back of his throat. 

“How can you _see me_ here? You’re--”

The answer amazingly sprung into his mind as a fully-formed idea. It had been lurking beneath the surface of his thoughts. “I’m not human, Bruce. Not even now. If I couldn’t see you, I’d light the dark just so I could.” 

And just to prove his point, Clark reached towards that feeling of warmth--and he shifted. A dim glow rose from his skin, and suddenly, blinking out of the darkness, Bruce saw Clark floating before him, folded into a peaceful lotus. 

It was too much.

Bruce’s jaw clenched, and he growled: “Come. back. to. me.”

The moment the light cut out, hands were all over him, rucking up his shirt, pressed into his cooling muscles, pulling the shirt off over his head. Bruce was going for blood. He felt teeth against his throat--still pinked by Bruce’s blade, a hand across his chest, squeezing the muscle beneath his skin, another hand yanking down the zipper of his pants. 

“Whatever you do--” Bruce said warningly. “Do. not. phase.”

Bruce didn’t even have to think--while Clark, off-balance, was still considering his options for removing the Suit--when hands that had beaten him half-to-death tore off his slacks completely. It was violence and passion in equal measure, what Bruce did to his body, and Clark arched up into it because he could take it. He felt every blow, gave back as many as he got, and finally, tangled with him on the floor.

“All night long,” Bruce said, as he pushed his hand through Clark’s hair, and pulled it tight, his neck curved in that punishing arc that Clark fucking craved. “All night long, you were in my ear. Breathing. Alive. Your voice--”

Bruce’s cracked.

“Do you not understand how miraculous that is?”

Clark kissed a hand, and brought it up to his mouth so Bruce could feel him smiling. “I think you may have to explain it to me again.” 

* * *

Bruce explained it to him again, slower this time, pouring his words out into the close darkness of his meditation chamber. He lined up against Clark’s back. The Suit had zippers for quick removal of the protective cup, and the jock had already been torn off. His cock was still slippery from his first orgasm--Clark’s hand moving quickly over the head, cupping him close--but he refused to do this without some preparation. A finger slipped passed the ring of Clark’s tight muscle, and he bucked forward into Bruce’s steadying hand, pressing into his chest. Burying his fingers in Clark felt--more than good--more than hot. Clark _burned._ Bruce pushed at Clark with his foot, easing him up onto the balls of his feet, until he was kneeling in a rest/ready position. 

In the familiar heat of his solitude, Bruce couldn’t stop the torrent of his words. He couldn’t tell Clark how important it was that he’d brought him here, where no one else had set foot. Bruce had no other secrets of importance--no declarations to make, no encouragements to give--so he told Clark about Jalalabad, about racing the rooftops of Charminar, about stealing bread for orphans in the desert--anything, anything-- 

Clark was naked, as naked as he’d been when he first appeared in the warehouse, as naked as he had been in the medbay when he’d first turned intangible. But so solid, and so, so alive. Bruce eased his fingers out, and chased after that heat as he lined up his cock and pushed inside. Clark took him, slowly, and Bruce’s muscles quivered and dripped with sweat as he went no faster than Clark could take him. When he was fully seated, Bruce held him, breathed with him, petted his side until Clark kicked at his thighs, like he might for a slow horse to hurry them along. 

Even now, Bruce could only hang onto the thin measure of his control as he pulled out, and thrust upward. He’d run out of words. He’d run out of patience. The pace he set was punishing. More than what he’d said with his fists, he said with his hitched breaths as Clark gasped, moaned (and once: a small sob when Bruce slid across what must have been the Kryptonian prostate). His second orgasm was punched out of him, and he stroked again and again until Clark shuddered through his own. 

“Do you understand now?” Bruce whispered against his ear, soothing a hand through Clark’s hair. “You came back. You kept _coming back._ ” 

Clark sagged back against him, and pulled one of Bruce’s hands to his softening cock. He ground up against Bruce, and groaned on this side of pleasure.

“Might be the farmboy in me, but sometimes it takes me a while to understand things. So how about I think on it for a night, and you explain it to me again tomorrow?”

* * *

Bruce fell asleep on the tatami mat, one of Clark’s knees wedged between his own. 

He dreamed of violent things, of gunshots--his upturned hand always too late to stop the tragedy at the heart of him. But that dream smoothed into another, less familiar place. He walked between the trees of the Wayne estate, in a corner of the grounds he didn’t recognize, far from the wide dirt paths. In the heart of that dappled wood, he found three trees more alive than life, more colorful than the black-and-white world that had nurtured them. 

Snaking around the base of them, a blue and silver vine grew out of the ground--so unlike any plant he’d ever seen before. (Hesitant but resolute) Bruce bent to touch it, and when he did, it curled around his fingers. Ten tiny little buds that he hadn’t seen before were preparing to bloom. And as the vine preened under his attention--he looked up towards the canopy--a tendril had already reached the sunlight, and there in the parched but blazing heat of him, one of them already had.

It was foolish of Bruce to have ever thought that he could control this.

**Author's Note:**

> In this fic, I introduce some elements from the DC universe that might not be familiar to fans of the DCEU. So here's a short comics primer for those who want it!
> 
>  **The Bleed** \-- The area between universes. It's the connective tissue that keeps the multiverse going (but separate). It's stuffed full of the unrealized potential of worlds. The Bleed is a trippy place where someone (or something) could travel faster than in normalspace, but could just as easily be lost forever. 
> 
> **The Carrier** \-- is an abandoned trading vessel, a shiftship that's capable of traveling through the multiverse. It was stationed in orbit around Earth, left in the Bleed, for unknown reasons. It has a bit of a personality, and definite opinions on who it likes and doesn't like (though it takes some time to form them). 
> 
> **What the hell is up with Clark?** \-- So, basic rundown: in the 90s, Superman went through his Electric Blue phase, where all of his powers shifted. What caused the power shift isn't as interesting as what happened... Clark basically stopped being recognized as a Kryptonian by his own Fortress, and his powers now included the ability to shift through dimensions (become intangible), as well as harness electrical forces in order to do something of the same as he could before. When he shifted out of his powers mode, he was completely vulnerable. Basically--a human being. It came to light later on that Clark was controlling his form. And so when he wasn't superpowered, he basically _made himself vulnerable_ , because that's what he thought being a normal person meant. This fic focuses on some of the issues that Clark experienced right at the beginning of his powers shift--causing electrical shorts and interference (like with the communicators), and his inability to actually Superhero in a way that made sense to him (bullets passed right through him!). And when he was superpowered, [he was blue](http://comicsalliance.com/files/2016/05/EB01k.jpg). Seriously, it was a fun/weird time. Eventually, Clark's powers returned to normal and he was the regular ole Kryptonian. 
> 
> I wanted to play around with that phase, because what would be weirder than a Clark that couldn't hold on to his tangibility because he was too busy having feelings?


End file.
